Protocol for a Kidnapping (8 page)

“Bill Jones?” I said.

He nodded, smiling and chuckling nastily, much as he had done over the phone when he found the name of the café amusing. “He is a countryman of yours and an old friend of mine. We were together during the war. Afterwards, because of a girl, my friend Bill Jones came back and now here he lives.” He pronounced Jones as if it began with a
Y
, but that’s what happens to the
J
in Yugoslavia.

“What’s he do?” I said.

Tavro shrugged. “He has done what any man must do to earn his living. He has driven a lorry and laid bricks and carpentered and dug ditches and repaired machinery. He is a man who can use his hands but who has never worked in a factory. And to my knowledge he has never worked long at anything, but still he has raised a family.”

“What’s he do when he’s not working?” I said.

“He fishes and when he’s not fishing, he hunts. And when he’s doing neither, he sits in the café and drinks his brandy and reads his newspaper and gossips with the rest. He is not an intellectual, Mr. St. Ives. He is just a man who fought well during the war, liked the country in which he fought, and who returned to live and work in it. And if he did not work too hard or make too great a contribution, what does that matter?”

“Not much,” I said.

“Do you find it strange that an American would do this?”

“I’d find it strange if many did it, but not one.”

“He has no politics. If you wish to get a message to me, leave it with him.”

“It’ll probably be a few days,” I said.

“It must be no longer than that.”

“You’re in a hurry?”

Tavro produced a cigarette and carefully turned it in his big fingers before lighting it. “I assume that you know who I was at one time and what post I held?”

I nodded. “Confidential assistant to the head of your secret police. I don’t remember what they call it.”

“They call it the UDBA,” he said. “I was accused, whether justly or unjustly is of no matter now, along with Vice-President Rankovic and removed from my post. For the past several years I have done little. I have read a great deal, something I never had time for before, and I have raised some fine flowers—do you care for flowers, Mr. St. Ives, for roses, especially?”

“Roses are fine,” I said.

“I have been exceptionally fortunate with mine. But to continue, I have lived these past few years, except for the surveillance which is now only cursory, much as a man in exile might live. I have few friends, none of them in government. My family is scattered, my wife is dead. So I thought that I had been forgotten, as a deposed politician should be. I was mistaken.”

“How?”

“There are those who want the information I have. At first they tried to persuade me. I refused. Then they threatened me and—” He spread his hands. “I believed them.”

“So you went to see Killingsworth,” I said.

“Yes. A fatuous man, but still shrewd enough not to offer me help unless I first gave him the information—one hundred and two pages of it.”

“And then he got kidnapped,” I said.

“Yes,” Tavro said, nodding a little cynically. “Kidnapped. Convenient wasn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “How long do you think you have?”

“Before what?”

“Before whoever wants you to give them that information carries out their threat—whatever it is.”

“The threat, Mr. St. Ives, is that they will kill me. I have every reason to believe them.”

I nodded. “All right. How long do you have?”

He shrugged. “Five days, possibly six.” He gestured almost apologetically. “There is no set deadline.”

“That’s still cutting it thin,” I said.

“Yes, Mr. St. Ives, it is. You have only a few hours to come up with a successful plan. However, there is one consolation.”

“What?”

He rose, leaned toward me over the table, and smiled unpleasantly. It may have been the only way he could smile. “If the plan that you devise in these next few days and hours fails,” he said, “it is entirely possible that you will have several years of solitude to determine why it did.
Laku noc
.”

A
T EIGHT THE NEXT
morning there was a call from Arrie Tonzi who said that she was downstairs with a mumbled name who was the embassy’s press or public affairs attaché and that they were on their way up. I immediately ordered coffee and then went into the bathroom and by the time I came out they were knocking at the door.

“You’re early, aren’t you?” I said as she came in wearing a blue dress whose skirt was even shorter than the one she’d worn the day before. I noticed that she still dragged the long suede coat.

“Not really,” she said, picking out a chair and crossing her legs before she sank into it. “The normal Yugoslav workday is seven till two. Philip St. Ives, Gordon Lehmann. Gordon’s the public affairs attaché.”

I shook hands with a middling-tall man in his late twenties whose shy, pleasant face looked far too honest for him ever to do well in public relations. “I’ve got fifty reporters in town yelling for a statement and I haven’t got anything to tell them,” he said. “All we can get out of Washington is to check with you.”

“They’ve got the ransom demand, haven’t they?” I said.

“They’ve already milked that dry. They want to talk to the go-between.”

“Can’t they get something out of Anton Pernik?”

“He won’t talk to them. Or at least that’s what the four government cops who’re guarding his apartment say.”

“Have they issued any statement?”

“The government?”

I nodded and Lehmann said, “Only a new version about how for humanitarian reasons and to maintain the excellent relations that they enjoy with the U.S. government they will release Pernik from protective custody et cetera and so on.”

“You’d better throw them a fish.”

“How?” he said.

I turned to Arrie Tonzi. “What time’s my appointment with the guy at the Ministry of Interior?”

“With Bartak? At eleven.”

I looked at Lehmann. “Why don’t you set up a press conference for me here at the hotel at half past noon?”

“You really want to talk to them?” he said and I was sure then that his honesty would forever bar him from the big time which might be too bad for the country, if not for him.

“No,” I said, “I don’t want to talk to them, but I’ll have to eventually and I’d rather choose the time than have a couple of them pop up from behind the hedgerow just as I’m handing Pernik over for the ambassador.”

He nodded and then asked, “Have you heard from the kidnappers?”

“We’d also better get the rules straight,” I said. “If I hear from the kidnappers, I may or may not decide to tell you about it. It depends entirely on what kind of proposal they make. This is going to be a tricky exchange because it involves not only three persons, but also a million dollars. When I accepted this assignment in Washington, I was assured that I would be in full charge. If I still am, then I’ll have to run it my way.”

It was a pompous little speech full of lies and distortions, with only a kernel or two of truth, and I was sorry that I had to feed it to Lehmann who seemed like a decent enough person, the kind who should be teaching journalism at some state university, but it contained a lot of what I was going to give the press so I had to see how well it went down. It went down so well that I thought Lehmann might lick his lips for more.

He had a long, slender head that he nodded at me now, almost eagerly, as if trying to show how anxious he was to cooperate. “We’ve been told to give you what you need,” he said, “but if you could talk to the press and explain why the negotiations have to be kept under wraps, it would certainly be a relief to me.”

“Fine, then set it up for twelve thirty and I’ll give them what I can.”

“I’ll get right on it.”

“There’s another thing,” I told him and after he asked what, I said, “When the kidnappers sent their original ransom demand, how’d they do it?”

“It was a phone call to the embassy.”

“Not to Killingsworth’s wife?”

“No, she’s been pretty much kept out of it.”

“Good.”

“Is that what you’re expecting, a phone call?” Lehmann asked.

“I don’t care what it is as long as I hear from them.”

“When do you think that’ll be?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you set any deadline?”

“Yes.”

“When is it?”

I smiled at him. “It’s when I start worrying because I haven’t heard from them.”

After calling Knight and asking him and Wisdom to monitor the press conference, I let Arrie Tonzi watch me eat a skimpy breakfast in the hotel dining room while she had some more coffee. The Yugoslavs, I found, aren’t at all keen about breakfast.

“You’re different this morning,” she said.

“How?”

“You seem to know what you’re doing.”

“You mean I didn’t yesterday?”

She reached over and took one of my cigarettes and lit it before I thought to do anything about it. “All you had yesterday were a lot of smart-ass cracks that weren’t as funny as they could have been.”

“It was a long flight,” I said.

“See?”

“See what?”

“You’re starting that funny-funny stuff again. You were different when you were handling Lehmann. You’re good at it, aren’t you?”

“At what?”

“At handling nice guys like Lehmann so they don’t know that they’re being handled.”

“It’s all part of the job.”

“Can I sit in when you talk to Bartak?”

“Do you want to?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I want to see how you handle someone who’s not so nice. From what I hear, Bartak’s a real prick.”

We drew the same driver and as far as I could tell the same Ford as the day before. Arrie Tonzi sat in back with me and pointed out the sights as we drove down the wide Bulevar Revolucije which I shrewdly translated into Boulevard of the Revolution without too much difficulty.

“That’s the main post office,” Arrie said and I gave it a dutiful glance. “And on your right for the next block or so is what they used to call the Parliament, but which is now known as the Federal Assembly.”

“A little architectural influence from the Hapsburgs, I’d say.”

She nodded. “If they didn’t have to put up with the Austrians, it was the Hungarians or the Venetians, and as if that weren’t bad enough, then came the Germans and way before that, the Turks and the Romans, and the Huns. There’s always been somebody tramping through Yugoslavia and telling them how to live. I don’t blame Tito for telling the Russians to bug off.”

“It wasn’t quite like that,” I said.

“I like to think it was.” She poked me in the arm. “Look to your left, across the park, and you can see the Royal Palace. The park used to be the Royal Gardens but they just call it the park now.”

I looked and decided that it was more Viennese whipped cream. I remembered that King Peter had lived there just before the war and I wondered where he lived now and if he really had any hope of living in the Palace again.

We turned left on Brankova Prizrenska and approached a bridge that crossed the Sava River. “Over there is Novi Beograd, or New Belgrade,” Arrie said. “Before the war, it was nothing but swamp, but now it’s got skyscrapers and museums and blocks of flats and lots of culture.”

“I don’t mind swamps,” I said.

“That tall thing is the Communist Presidium and Conference headquarters. Twenty-six stories high. The Presidium runs things but it’s supervised by the annual Conference.”

“It’s a nice building,” I said. “This is on the way to the airport, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said. “I could have pointed it all out to you yesterday, but you didn’t seem too interested.”

“That’s probably because they’re all beginning to look alike,” I said.

“What?”

“Cities and towns. The European towns that were destroyed by the war didn’t just lose some buildings, they lost the flavor that made Zagreb different from Aachen, if you like to alphabetize things. When they design buildings now, they avoid the baroque and the rococo because it’s expensive and it’s not really needed and that’s fine. But they also avoid giving buildings any distinctive character of their own and so an office building in Moscow looks pretty much like an office building in Manhattan.”

“And you don’t like that?”

“Not much.”

“What do you want?”

“Hell, I don’t know. A little Tabasco in the plans, I guess. Even some whimsy. What’s wrong with a dash of fey in the design for the Ministry for Cultural Affairs as long as it lets in the light and keeps out the weather?”

“What do you think of that one?” she asked. “Got enough fey in it for you?”

It was a sweeping, graceful building which rose just the other side of the bridge.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The Museum of Modern Art,” she said. “What do you think?”

“I like it.”

“You won’t like the Ministry of Interior,” she said. “No Tabasco.”

She was right. It was a plain, ugly building, seven stories high and perhaps six years old, that was built conveniently close to the Presidium skyscraper. Inside there was the usual fuss about whom we wanted to see and where we wanted to go and while one of the uniformed guards was on the telephone, I examined a mural done in harsh yellows and reds and blues and unhappy browns that tried to portray the accomplishments of one of Tito’s five-year plans. I assumed that the plan had been more successful than the mural, but then I’ve seldom liked murals.

I never did get a satisfactory translation for Slobodan Bartak’s title (he was either deputy assistant minister or deputy to the assistant minister), but from the size of his office I could tell that he was a comer and from the ambition on his youthful face, I expected him to go a far way.

He was still in his early thirties, but when Arrie Tonzi displayed an unconsciously generous portion of both crotch and thigh as she sat down, it drew only a quick glance from Bartak and if there was any reaction other than a flicker of prudish disapproval, I failed to detect it.

Bartak hadn’t risen when we were ushered in, and we hadn’t shaken hands, and he hadn’t done much of anything other than to nod that he was aware of our existence, if not thrilled by it, and that if we liked, we could sit down. There were two files on his desk, a thin green one and a fat blue one. He flipped through the fat blue one for a while and when he got tired of that he opened the thin green one and pressed its spine down so that it would lie flat on his desk. On the page that he turned to there was a picture, about three by five inches, and even upside down, I didn’t think it did me justice.